Don't Get Lost

Smart Device Central has published an interesting overview of the smartphone world. They report that although smartphones accounted for less than 5% of US sales of cell phones in the first quarter of 2006, sales of Treos and Windows Mobile licenses grew 85% and 90% respectively over the past year. The Motorola Q has been a huge success for Verizon, and could be a breakthrough product in leading smartphones into the mainstream.

They follow the statistics with a round up of current top smartphones, although I was disappointed to see no mention of GPS capability, presumably because it is still lacking in most of the leading models. Financial columnist Jim Jubak predicted earlier this year that "mapping everywhere" was one of the "7 next big things in tech" and cited a study from IDC that said that the number of GPS-enabled cell phones (which would be both smartphones and regular phones) will grow six-fold from 2004 to 2008, so I think it was remiss of Smart Device Central not to at least touch on that.

Of course any smartphone with Bluetooth can use an inexpensive separate Bluetooth GPS receiver from Holux, Pharos, etc.

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